In recent years, compactness, high output, and high quality have been required in rotary electric machines such as electric motors or generators. With regard to downsizing rotary electric machines of this kind, armature windings that have concentrated windings in which conductor wires are wound onto individual armature core teeth have been used with a view to downsizing coil ends, which do not generate effective magnetic flux. However, armatures that use armature windings of distributed winding construction that can suppress torque pulsation and increase output are in demand.
Now, in contrast to concentrated windings, which are configured by winding conductor wires onto individual teeth, windings that are configured by winding conductor wires into pairs of slots that are separated by greater than or equal to two slots are designated “distributed windings”. In other words, distributed windings are windings that are wound for a plurality of turns such that a conductor wire that extends outward from one slot spans two or more consecutive teeth and enters another slot.
In conventional methods for manufacturing coils such as that described in Patent Literature 1, hexagonal coil wires have been produced by chucking at a set pitch a wire material that has a length that is equivalent to a single turn, operating the respective chucking portions to apply two-dimensional bending to the wire material, and then applying three-dimensional bending to the wire material to which two-dimensional bending has been applied.